Spot the difference…
Tag: 2020 elections
Don’t Be Fooled: The 2020 Election Has Already Been Decided
Republicans and Democrats alike fear that the other party will attempt to hijack this election. President Trump is convinced that mail-in ballots are a scam except in Florida, where it’s safe to vote by mail because of its “great Republican governor.” The FBI is worried about foreign hackers continuing to target and exploit vulnerabilities in the nation’s electoral system, sowing distrust about the parties, the process, and the outcome.
I, on the other hand, am not overly worried: after all, the voting booths have already been hijacked by a political elite comprised of Republicans and Democrats who are determined to retain power at all costs.
The outcome is a foregone conclusion: the Deep State will win and “we the people” will lose.
For Mark Kelly, Attending Forum Hosted by CCP Was the Beginning of Lucrative Relationship with China
The Chinese government invited then-astronaut Mark Kelly, now an Arizona Democratic Senate candidate, to an all-expenses-paid retreat at a countryside resort in 2003. He left China five days later not only with a future spouse, former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D., Ariz.), but also with lucrative regime business contacts.
Kelly attended the annual Young Leaders Forum, a five-day junket cohosted by the Chinese People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs, which is “under the leadership of the Communist Party of China.” The conference allowed Kelly an opportunity to mingle with high-profile Communist Party officials and rising stars in Chinese society. Attendees included Cui Tiankai, now Chinese ambassador to the United States; Fang Xinghai, former director of the CCP’s top committee on the economy; and Zhou Mingwei, the party’s former top foreign propaganda honcho.
China analyst Gordon G. Chang said that party connections—such as those Kelly fostered—are “absolutely essential” for securing Chinese business deals.
“The Communist Party tries to control everything, whether it’s a state enterprise or a private company,” he said. “And so it’s extremely important to have Communist Party contacts [to do business].”
Kelly has also had extensive ties with China since becoming a civilian. World View Enterprise, an aerospace company he cofounded and in which he still holds investments, received funding from Chinese tech giant Tencent, which censors the internet for Beijing. As the Washington Free Beacon reported, he also held a financial stake in a Colorado company that courted investments from a Chinese state-funded tech enterprise.
He now has assets worth up to $27 million, according to his financial disclosure.
Facebook Will Restrict Certain Users If US Election Gets “Extremely Chaotic Or Violent”
Earlier this week, Facebook gave us a welcome break from the virtue-signaling by threatened to pull its business from Europe should courts uphold an EU-wide ban on transfering European user data to US-based servers (something Washington is desperately trying to stop TikTok from doing, in a sense).
But that didn’t last long. On Tuesday, the social media giant’s head of global communications, former deputy PM Nick Clegg, told the Financial Times that the company is developing contingency plans should the US election lead to an outbreak of chaos and uncertainty. Though he didn’t go into too much detail, the implication is clear: Facebook is planning to significantly curtail speech on its platform, echoing the Internet blackouts utilized by authoritarian regimes including Iran, Venezuela and elsewhere.
Clegg preferred to call them the “break-the-glass” options, and assured readers that they probably wouldn’t happen anyway.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Nick Clegg, the company’s head of global affairs, said it had drawn up plans for how to handle a range of outcomes, including widespread civic unrest or “the political dilemmas” of having in-person votes counted more rapidly than mail-in ballots, which will play a larger role in this election due to the coronavirus pandemic. “There are some break-glass options available to us if there really is an extremely chaotic and, worse still, violent set of circumstances,” Mr Clegg said, though he stopped short of elaborating further on what measures were on the table. The proposed actions, which would probably go further than any previously taken by a US platform, come as the social media group is under increasing pressure to lay out how it plans to combat election-related misinformation, voter suppression and the incitement of violence on the November 3 election day and during the post-election period.
Of course, post-election day indecision is nothing new in American politics, though it will be the first time we’ve seen one since Facebook was founded in 2004. It also comes – as the FT none-too-subtly points out – as “conerns mount that even US president Donald Trump himself could take to social media to contest the result or call for violent protest, potentially triggering a constitutional crisis.”
But don’t worry: Because as Clegg explains, Facebook has done this before in “other parts of the world.”
“We have acted aggressively in other parts of the world where we think that there is real civic instability and we obviously have the tools to do that [again],” Mr Clegg added, citing the previous use of “pretty exceptional measures to significantly restrict the circulation of content on our platform”.
Facebook has also taken several steps to immediately step up and address any harmful activity that might emerge on its platform during the election. Citing unnamed sources, the FT says Facebook has planned for more than 70 scenarios, and that any high-stakes decisions will fall to a team of executives including CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg. The company is employing a range of experts, including military planners, to help the company’s leadership make the best decisions possible.
“We’ve slightly reorganised things such that we have a fairly tight arrangement by which decisions are taken at different levels [depending on] the gravity of the controversy attached,” Mr Clegg said. The executive also said that “the amount of resources we are throwing at this is very considerable”. Facebook will have a virtual war room – dubbed its “Election Operations Centre” – for monitoring for suspicious activity and updating its “voter information hub”, which will showcase verified results to users, he said.
Joe Biden is the enemy of BLM
Dennis and Deana Molla, who had draped “Trump 2020” flags on their home in Minneapolis, awoke Wednesday morning to find their garage and trucks ablaze and graffiti scrawled on the two doors of the garage. On one door was painted “BLM” over the circle-A anarchism symbol, and on the other “Biden 2020.”
We have witnessed an unprecedented degree of political stupidity in recent months but the comedic contradictions make this case special.
Leaving aside the idea that anarchists would endorse a career politician to be head of state, it is impossible to logically reconcile support for the Black Lives Matter movement with an endorsement or even a vote for Joe Biden. For those who are passionately angry about the number of black people caged and killed by police in recent decades, Biden should in fact be the object of more scorn than any other politician, including Donald Trump. And yet many people holding a Black Lives Matter sign in one hand are holding a “Biden 2020” sign in the other.
It is now fairly well known that as Democratic Senator from Delaware, Biden was the author and principal proponent of what became the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which included an unprecedented expansion of mandatory minimum sentences, applied the death penalty to 60 crimes, and funded state prison construction and the hiring of 100,000 new police officers. Biden used the law to respond to the common — and erroneous — criticism that liberals were soft on crime:
Let me define the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is now for 60 new death penalties. That is what is in this bill. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party has 70 enhanced penalties…. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 100,000 cops. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 125,000 new state prison cells.
Four years after Biden’s crime bill became law, the number of people under correctional control was seven times greater than in 1970, and the black-to-white ratio for incarceration rates had risen from 3-to-1 to 6-to-1. The legions of police that were deployed into the streets by the federal law and the new responsibilities they were given to enforce drug laws and ever more “quality of life” laws — largely in Democrat-controlled cities — radically increased the number of encounters between police and the less-wealthy residents of those cities, with predictable results: there are now 2.3 million people incarcerated in American prisons and 1,000 civilians killed by police per year.
No one has done more to create the very conditions that the Black Lives Matter has organized itself against than Joe Biden.
And it doesn’t end in the US: if black lives matter, we should also consider Biden’s record overseas. Yet I have not seen any pictures of signs at Black Lives Matter protests denouncing the killing of black and brown lives in the ongoing U.S. wars in East Africa, Yemen, Syria, and—seemingly always—Iraq and Afghanistan, but if BLM protesters believed those non-white lives mattered as much as George Floyd’s or Jacob Blake’s they would consider Joe Biden to be a monster worse than Trump.
As chairman of the Foreign Relations committee in 2002 and 2003, Biden championed the invasion and occupation of Iraq and was deemed by the New Republic the Democrats’ “de facto spokesman on the war against terrorism.” He served as the Bush administration’s close ally in prosecuting the war, declaring in one hearing that the “weapons of mass destruction” alleged to be stockpiled in Iraq “must be dislodged from Saddam, or Saddam must be dislodged from power.”
As vice president, Biden was tasked with coming up with a strategy to maintain the intensity and breadth of the war on terror but with fewer U.S. boots on the ground. He proposed what he called “counterterrorism plus,” which ultimately became the Obama administration’s general approach to the wars in Africa and the Middle East. Biden helped invent what came to be known as the “Obama Doctrine” of increased “surgical” tactics, which involved sending in Special Forces on assassination missions and bombing suspected terrorists via drones. By the end of Obama and Biden’s two terms, the US military was bombing seven different Muslim-majority countries, killing hundreds of civilians — farmers, funerals, a wedding party, and even the sixteen-year-old American citizen Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki, whose father had been assassinated by a drone two weeks earlier.
Governor Cuomo Ominously Wants Military At Polling Stations
In the kind of move one would expect in a Third World Banana Republic, the corrupt government term- not the clothing chain, New York Democrat Governor Andrew Cuomo Monday called for National Guard troops under his control to man polling stations on Election Day in New York state. Is that worried about the Trump vote or is he just trying to ensure his ballot harvesting and election fraud plans aren’t interrupted by anyone? Probably both.
The New York Post reports: “During a teleconference with reporters, Cuomo said that ‘the Board of Elections is basically a person-powered, staffing function” and that the June 23 primary elections “showed a lot of issues with the local boards.’ ‘We said to them, ‘Learn from that experience, tell us what you need,’ he said. ‘We can use National Guard personnel to help.’ Cuomo said he’s also prepared to have state and local government employees idled by the coronavirus crisis fill in for poll workers, even though Election Day is among the 12 legal holidays recognized by the Empire State.”
This possible dictatorial move recalls Cuomo’s reticence to deploy the Guard to deal with violent riots in the spring and summer that spead across New York City.
Kamala Harris ‘Wanted to Be a Prosecutor to Protect’ Victims of Sexual Abuse, Failed to Protect Victims of Priests
During Harris’s tenure as San Francisco’s chief prosecutor, however, she showed no signs of protecting victims of sexual abuse, since she failed to prosecute any of the sexual abuse claims brought against Catholic priests in her city, despite outcries from victim groups.
Breitbart News Senior Contributor Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute, reported in his book titled Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite, that during her 13-year tenure as district attorney and then attorney general, Harris failed to prosecute even one case of priest sexual abuse, even as at least 50 major cities had brought charges against priests during that same period.
While Harris was neglecting pursuing the prosecution of cases of priest sexual abuse, her office “would strangely hide vital records on abuses that had occurred,” Schweizer revealed.
The bombshell details showed that while Harris’s predecessor, former San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan, had launched an aggressive investigation into priests of the Archdiocese of San Francisco accused of sexual abuse, Harris’s campaign to unseat Hallinan showed an unusual influx of unparalleled donations from high-level officials of the Catholic Church.
“Harris had no particular ties to the Catholic Church or Catholic organizations, but the money still came in large, unprecedented sums,” Schweizer wrote.
In addition to campaign donations from multiple law firms defending San Francisco priests against abuse claims, Schweizer observed that “board members of San Francisco Catholic archdiocese-related organizations and their family members donated another $50,950 to Harris’s campaign.”
As Schweizer noted, Harris’s ties to those working to block exposure of the archdiocese’s secret documents containing information about priests accused of sexual abuse were extensive.
Senate report links Hunter Biden to ‘prostitution or human trafficking ring’
Hunter Biden sent “thousands of dollars” to people who appear to be involved in the sex industry, according to a report released Wednesday by Republicans in the US Senate.
The report says unspecified records show that Biden “has sent funds to non-resident alien women in the United States who are citizens of Russia and Ukraine and who have subsequently wired funds they have received from Hunter Biden to individuals located in Russia and Ukraine.”
“The records also note that some of these transactions are linked to what ‘appears to be an Eastern European prostitution or human trafficking ring,’” the report says.
The allegations are contained in a footnote to a section of the report that details potential “criminal concerns and extortion threats” involving the son of Democratic presidential nominee and former Vice President Joe Biden and other members of the Biden family.
The report also cites “extensive public reporting concerning Hunter Biden’s alleged involvement with prostitution services.”
From Mass Incarceration to Plan Colombia: Biden’s Role in the Failed War on Drugs
In an increasingly angry and bad faith campaign, Donald Trump and his team are presenting Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden as an anti-police radical controlled by the far left. Last week, the Trump campaign sent a text message to supporters warning them that Antifa would raid their homes if Biden wins in November. “They’ll disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home and invite MS-13 to live next door,” warned Florida congressman Matt Gaetz.
The reality, however, is that the 77-year-old former vice president has a long history of opposing progressive legislation and spearheading increasingly more draconian police, immigration, and criminal justice measures. Biden first shot to prominence in the 1970s, when, as a freshman senator, he became a leading voice against bussing, the practice of desegregating schools via public transport (something his now-running mate Kamala Harris grilled him on during the debates). He also maintained a close relationship with arch segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond, who left the Democratic party and became a Republican due to his vehement opposition to the Civil Rights Act. He even read the eulogy at Thurmond’s funeral, around the time of which it came out that Thurmond had fathered a child with a 15-16-year-old black servant girl working for him.
“Hang People for Jaywalking”
But Biden’s problematic history with race goes much further; the Delawarian has been one of the chief architects of the racist prison system we live under today. For decades, he pushed for more cops, more jails, more arrests, and more convictions, even criticizing the notorious Ronald Reagan for not locking enough people up.
Throughout the 1980s, he and Thurmond worked on a number of bills that radically reshaped the criminal justice system, including the 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act which limited parole and cut sentence reductions for good behavior. Biden continued to attack Republican George H.W. Bush from the right on crime, in 1989, condemning his draconian proposals as not going far enough. “In a nutshell, the President’s plan does not include enough police officers to catch the violent thugs, enough prosecutors to convict them, enough judges to sentence them, or enough prison cells to put them away for a long time,” he said, later demanding to know why Bush hadn’t executed more drug dealers like he wanted.
Despite Bush pushing through substantial increases to the prison industrial system, Biden continually demanded more, publishing his own plans that included billions more in funding for increased numbers of police, FBI, and DEA agents.
This all culminated in what in 2007 he called his “greatest accomplishment” in politics: the controversial 1994 Crime Bill. Often labeled the “Biden Crime Bill” because of its author and chief promoter, the bill laid the basis for an ever-increasing prison population, introducing the death penalty for dozens of new offenses and spent billions on hundreds of thousands of extra police and prison cells. Just as Bill Clinton was making a point of returning to Arkansas to oversee the execution of a mentally handicapped black man, Biden was staking out his position as a new leader of the new, “tough on crime” Democrats, boasting that his bill meant that “we do everything but hang people for jaywalking.” As his biographer Branko Marcetic wrote, Biden makes Hillary Clinton look like [civil rights advocate] Michelle Alexander.
Suckers!
Hellbound and Down 
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